Cryptonite Women – Part 2

Last week we looked at five of the top female influencers in the crypto industry. This week we look at another five and see how their involvement is shaping the world of crypto.

Catheryne Nicholson

Nicholson comes from a background in
software product management and has built large-scale commercial software
platforms in education, energy and emissions management and defense systems.
She is an engineer, entrepreneur, former US Naval Officer and a Mother.

Catheryne Nicholson is the CEO and
Co-Founder of BlockCypher, an industry-leading web services company.
BlockCypher enables corporations to build blockchain applications in a
facilitated manner.

Elizabeth Rossiello

Elizabeth Rossiello runs one of the
best-recognised companies in the cryptocurrency space, BitPesa. BitPesa uses
Bitcoin and blockchain technology to facilitate payments in local currencies,
making it possible for businesses to enter new markets that would previously
have been inaccessible to them.

“How do you run a finance company when
you’re not in Hong Kong or London or New York?” says Rossiello. “That’s what
crypto does. It lets you build these really cool, connected things from
anywhere. And I’ve proven that with this company.”

Rossiello is a big supporter of women in
the industry, which partly comes from her own experience. While pregnant with
her second child in 2012, she was looking for work but found it difficult to
get a full-time contract, in spite of having considerable experience with
high-brow companies like Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs.

“Nobody would hire me because I was a
pregnant woman with a small child and the work would involve frequent travel
and long hours. I was losing jobs to people who had less experience,” she says.
So instead, she decided to set up her own company.

BitPesa is now in seven African countries,
Europe and the UK. Of the 70 people BitPesa employees, half are women.

Arianna Simpson

Arianna Simpson first started investing in
Bitcoin in 2013 and is now an investor, speaker and writer in the crypto space.
She’s the Founder and Managing Director of Autonomous Partners, an investment
fund focused on cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Simpson speaks on all
technology-related topics and regularly contributes to crypto publications like
CoinDesk and Business Insider.

Elizabeth Stark

Stark is the co-founder and CEO of
Lightning Labs and a Fellow at Coin Center (the digital currency policy
organization). Lightning Labs provides a more scalable blockchain to make
transactions quicker and cheaper.

“There’s a massive opportunity here to
change the global financial structure, to change a lot of ways that society
interacts with technology,” Stark says. “And it is crucially important that
women participate. Women need to be building this new frontier. There’s way too
much of the prior generation of the Internet that was not built by a diverse
group of people.”

Linda Xie

Linda Xie is the Co-Founder and Managing
Director of Scalar Capital, a crypto investment management company specialising
in diverse tokens. She is also an advisor to the 0x project which is an open
protocol for decentralized exchange on the ethereum blockchain.

Previously, Xie worked with regulators and
law enforcement on compliance for digital assets at digital currency platform
CoinBase.

We’ve now looked at 10 women in the crypto space – or cryptonite women – making a name for themselves in disadvantaged territory. Further to their own successes, they’re also playing key parts as influencers and role models to younger woman around the world who might also one day also seek to challenge the status quo.